Saturday, November 07, 2009

Electric blues

I have a bit of a problem with my modeling sometimes. As it turns out, I'm somewhat of a perfectionist (those of you who know me will be somewhat surprised at this admission). Perfectionism takes many forms (I read it in a student pamphlet so it must be true). my particular cross to bear is that I often struggle to get something started if I don't think it will finish out the way that I want it to.

Cut to something that makes sense. My Ed project has been stalled for a month or so as I was not sure about how I was going to do the ends. These are a complex mix of geometry stuff and I was really not looking forward to them. Fast forward to the current modeling bench session and I'm looking around for something that does not involve guards vans and might actually finish some of the 1/2 complete projects on the bench.I started off by cutting a strip of 0.5mm plasticard about 1mm over the height required for the front. Measuring off the plan gave a 5mm flat front piece, and I added in about 8mm for the bent back front bits, and then cut 4 pieces of plasticard to size. I scribed some lines into the back of the plasticard and then bent the front plate slightly. I chamfered a small bit of plastic of f the side panels. these were then glued into position and left to dry. I rounded the corners with a file. Suddenly flush with this massive break in my psychosis I then leapt on and started with the roof. The Ed has a recess in the roof where all the electric bits fit, that I decided to emulate by laminating 2 pieces of 1mm plasticard together. The first piece was just a flat plate measured up off the body dimensions. I first sanded the top of the body flat by rubbing it on a piece of flat fine grade sand paper, and then glued this first piece into place. Smaller rectangles were then used to form the second layer with the recessed part where the pantographs would fit.

(Note to self; If you had taken more/any pictures while you were actually doing this then you would not be reduced to explaining it extremely badly would you...dumbass).

I then used a variety of implements to shape the plasticard to the roof contours that I wanted. Again its one of those things that you have to make a personal decision on when to say enough.

heres a picture with the pantographs placed on top just to see what they look like.Next up will be the overlays for the ends (to add the windows) and the detail on the sideframes.